Border Wars

I find Jay sitting in a small park, feeding birdseed to birds. He can’t see, but he senses the bindings of their movement and hunger, the throws expertly leaving no seed wasted as breezes move seeds toward the birds that like them best. I could do that with magic; he’s doing it without even thinking about it. Being Jaysome, as he might phrase it most days. Today isn’t one of those.

I walk over and sit on the park bench beside him. “Kiddo.”

Jay turns his head and looks up, eyes filled with broken light wide behind dark glasses. He gulps loudly enough that some birds take flight, his face drained of colour. “H-Honcho,” he whispers. “I’m thorry.”

I blink. I didn’t even know Jay’s lisp remained in him at all. “Why?”

“You – you told me not to eat people and I ate the part of them that – that – that –. I hurt who they were, and changed it and made them into not-them a bit and I shouldn’t have done that but I was really mad and they tried to kill Charlie and would have hurt you and I lost my temper a lot and I can’t undo what I did cuz I don’t want to undo it enough and I’m scared,” he gets out in a rush.

“Jay.” I reach over, and pull him in for a hug. “It’s okay. People lose their tempers all the time.”

“But I’m not a people,” he whispers.

“Most creatures from Outside the universe have tempers, too,” I say dryly, letting go and giving him a light poke on the nose. “Would you do that again?”

Jay is quiet for several seconds. Then he nods. “They would have –.”

“Jay. A lot of things hurt me. Many try to kill me too, for one reason or another. The Border Patrol isn’t unique in wanting that.”

“But they want it lots,” he says firmly, sounding a little more like himself.

“You mean hurting me, or hurting in general?”

“Both?” he offers.

“You’ve met people from the Black Chamber too: did you want to hurt them?” Jay bites his lower lip between his teeth, then just nods. “But you didn’t.”

“Cuz you kinda did and we were busy but it’s the same kind of – of really bad bindings, Honcho!”

“Ah.” I take some seed, throwing it to the ducks, calling up magic to mimic what Jay was doing. He begins feeding them as well, head turned toward me, waiting in a nervous silence. “The Border Patrol help keep the world free from Outsiders to sneak in past the Cone and the Grave, Jay. The Black Chamber deals with the threat of monsters by breaking up breeding pairs – killing one of them, generally. They’re ordinary humans using technology, guts and desperation to do things I can do easily. Banishing Outsiders is what magicans are for: I don’t even need to try to do that, for things like vampires. The Border Patrol has lost whole units against lone vampires at times.”

“Really?” Jay says skeptically, since vampires tend to be the weakest form Outsiders take on entering the universe.

“Really. Magicians aren’t everywhere, the fae can’t be everywhere, nor other Outsiders helping protect the world and so forth. Sometimes it’s just them, with no backup, no hope. They know they’re outgunned, but they still fight. Some even do terrible rituals and are changed so that they can even the odds a little. Giving up their own humanity to defend the humanity they are fighting for.”

“Oh.”

“They are monsters often enough, but they’re the monsters they need to be.” Jay says nothing. “Do you think humans could stop you from being Jaysome?”

Jay looks at me and blinks a few times. “Who would want to do that?” he demands, eyes widen in shock.

“Let’s say that got confused, and believed they had to. Could they, even if magicians helped them?”

“Nope,” he says without a pause, his grin wide and huge.

“Exactly. Now imagine it was a monster being very monstersome, and they couldn’t stop it either. They had to, but they couldn’t, so they go too far. Always and ever, desperate and determined. Because no matter how high the cost of victory, defeat is always worse. That’s what they’ve learned, those are the truths they know, Jay. Just think about it, next time. And try not to scare them too much?”

Jay frowns, then nods and begins throwing more bird seed. “I did a big ooops then?”

“You did, but I’ll talk to the Black Chamber and see what can be fixed. Undoing it would be even worse at this point.” I reach over and hug him again, tight as I can. “You protected Charlie, Jay, and that matters a lot too.”

I let go and Jay grins even wider at that. “I was pretty Jaysome,” he boasts.

“You were. They were doing what they thought was right, but so were you.”

“Only I was more right, cuz of being Jaysome.”

“Probably,” I say, since trying to explain he might not have been won’t lead anywhere good. I stand, and Jay throws the last of the bird seed and follows, asking about other government agencies and whether he can meet them too.

A small part of me wants to introduce Jay to the IRS, but I think he might run screaming from the bindings they do. I say we’ll look into it, since he did scare the Border Patrol a lot, but I add nothing to that and switch the conversation to other adventures he had when he was away.

There is a cost to all things, especially the kindness of magicians. I spend an hour hearing every single word Jay has learned in dog and cat in the past two days.

Bent Minds

The explosion rocks the RV slightly, wards humming with discharged energies as I finish making coffee. It says a lot about my life that I pour the coffee into a mug before I consider investigating. Jay, of course, has no such restraint. I turn even as the RV door closes behind him, hear another explosive roar of force and Jay’s yelp of pain.

I scowl, feeling the power of the god within me stirring, and pause long enough to text the wandering magician with ‘where r u?’ before I walk outside. There is no response; he probably has his phone turned off. Or even his phone can’t get a signal in whatever place he had to go to.

There is a Jay-shaped indent in the side of the RV, with Jay is picking himself up off the ground and shaking his head a little. He looks to be eleven but is from Outside the universe. He’s quick, good with bindings, and it seems tough enough to take a bazooka at close range and just get impressive bruising from it.

There are seven people dressed up like movie action heroes in a bad movie. Guns, a second bazooka, grenades. They look like military people trying to be ninjas, but no less dangerous for all of that. Guns go off the moment Jay is standing. The kid stumbles back into the side of the RV. I reach, pull up the god inside it – it comes reluctantly, sensing more danger than I do – and I speak in tones that would terrify gods.

“What are you doing here?”

I’m not a magician, but it gets their attention. Enough that the bazooka is aimed toward me and falling apart into metal components between one moment and the next. The other guns fall apart, bullets and grenades splitting like ripe nuts and Jay is beside me and glaring at them, undoing what binds them together without even trying.

“I came outside to say hi to strangers coming to visit us and they shot me,” he says. His clothing is almost gone, and there is a deep purple bruise on his chest.

“Believe me, I did notice that,” I say dryly.

“And they were going to shoot you and that’s not Jaysome at all. Plus they smell of death and lots of not-nice things,” Jay says firmly.

“Right. Go inside and get changed; if they try anything, you can send them on an adventure.”

Jay nods, and vanishes back into the RV in a blur. I walk toward the soldiers and smile; they fall back a little. “Talk.”

“We came seeking the wandering magician.”

“He’s out, and coming to seek him with weapons is stupid. Even for the government.”

A tall, solid man steps forward. “We are not government. We are the Border Patrol.”

I nod; I’ve had few dealings with them. I know they make the Black Chamber look kind and their method of protecting the earth from forces from Outside is very much ‘kill first and dissect the remains for answers’. I doubt they’re unarmed despite what Jay did. “Magicians don’t need the kind of help you can offer.”

The man stares down at me, his eyes cold and flat. “You will find we can be very persuasive.”

I could use my own power, but they are not gods to be eaten. I think, Jay, and know he hears me through the friendship-bindings we share. He is beside me a moment later, putting his white cane into my hand as he stares up at the border patrol. “Hi! We didn’t meet properly: I’m Jay and we’re friends,” and there is power under the words, a hum of energy as the members of the border patrol turn glass-eyed.

“You have lots of training to resist bindings, but I’m all kinds of good at them,” Jay says. “And you shot me, and that’s not being friendly at all and you were going to hurt Charlie and brought guns to visit Honcho. So you’re not going to hurt us,” and all seven people stagger at the binding Jay lays upon them without even trying.

“Jay,” I say carefully.

“I said we’d be friends in a way that isn’t friends at all,” Jay says, and turns to grin up at me proudly. “I said one thing and meant another and I did it even if it made my head hurt a lot!”

“I –.” I begin and the leader moves, one hand almost as Jay’s neck before he jerks back with shuddering gasp, sweat beading his forehead.

Jay turns back to them, and he’s not smiling at all. “I used friendship as a crack to put a binding on you, but I didn’t have to be that nice at all and –.”

“Delta.” The leader doesn’t move, but behind him one soldier steps back, to the left and there is a void where there were between one moment and the next.

I’ve eaten magic, gods, energy – even that of Outsiders – but until now I’ve never had anything try to eat me. Unpleasant tingling runs through my body and the god inside me is frozen in a moment of shock as whatever was inside the Border Patrol soldier hurls into me. I gather my power, to try and undo an eating, to heal myself, and between one moment and the next the tingling is gone.

“You will not hurt Charlie or Honcho,” Jay says, and his voice is a dark crushing. The soldiers drop to their knees, all six looking as if they’d been sucker punched right in the kidneys.

“Jay,” I say.

Jay stares at the soldiers for a long moment, then is beside me, his left hand in my right, trembling as I squeeze his fingers. “They were going to – to hurt you,” he whispers, “so I didn’t let them but – but I can’t have them not hurt me, since they wouldn’t be them if they couldn’t hurt Outsiders? That isn’t right either,” he continues, a bit louder. “But Honcho said I can’t change people like that, even if they deserve it.”

“I imagine they deserve far worse,” I say quietly as the members of the Border Patrol stand back up. “You seriously came here with weapons to threaten a magician?”

“We did,” the leader says, as though it makes all the sense in the world.

“You can’t break magicians,” I say, “definitely not with guns.”

“We have broken some in our time. To be human is to have weaknesses,” he says, not looking away.

“And you’re here for his help because of yours?”

He nods once. “Our Commander, Logan, is – unwell. His mind has gone around the bend, as some might say. We cannot afford to lose a Commander to madness at this time. The wandering magician is powerful even by our rubric: we were going to compel his aid.”

Jay giggles at that idea. I squeeze his hand tight. “I see.” I glance down at Jay. “Can you fix that?”

Jay thinks it over, then nods and vanishes between one moment and the next.

A man and woman step out of formation toward me, falling back a moment later with small gasps of shock. I just smile; whatever they’ve done to themselves, however they’ve been trained, Jay’s binding isn’t one they’re able to break at all. That it clearly terrifies them adds to the smile.

Jay appears again. “Okay. Logan is better now; his thoughts went into really dark places but I pulled him out with a binding and I didn’t try and make friends with him because I don’t like you people at all!”

The members of the Border Patrol visibly flinch, as though expecting Jay to act, but he just turns and looks at me. “I kinda want ice cream and quiet now, Charlie?”

“All right.” I glance over his head; the Border Patrol members take the hint and back off, vanishing into a pale blue portal after they’re a good half-block away from us.

Jay sniffs. I glance down, and he slams himself against me, head buried into my stomach as he whimpers.

“Kiddo.”

“Honcho is going to be mad at me,” he wails.

I push him away, and crouch down to be even, never mind that he can’t see me. “He might be; I’m not him, so I can’t say. But I’ll stand up for you: you did what you had to, and you protected us.”

“I didn’t make any friends,” Jay says slowly, looking surprised.

“You didn’t. Are you okay with that?”

Jay is quiet for a long moment, teeth digging into his lower lip, then nods. “They aren’t nice at all.”

I close my eyes, glad Jay can’t see my face, and stand, I hand him his cane, and we begin walking down the road. Neither of us say anything, but I get Jay two extra scoops of ice cream as if that can somehow make up for a small loss of innocence.

Given Jay, I can only hope that it does.

Walking Dangers

It is a rare thing for a fae to claim a name. But I have used the name of Dana for some years, worn the glamour of her form for so long that it is the easiest glamour I know. I almost died, in ways fae do not die, and I can no longer let go of this glamour. It may be that the wandering magician did something to me, or it is simply a result of the entity named Jay binding me into life. I have been told I am not Dana, even though I am. I travelled with a magician, when that is not a thing fae do. I am moving between states, shifting into new thought-forms, and I do not know why.

Fae are. We have a Duty, and we follow through with it until we are not. To be fae is to be magic, to be power in a way foreign to almost everything else in the universe. We do not have limits as they have limits. But we can die. There are Outsiders potent enough to tear the magic that we are apart. Magicians who might, with great skill, impede us. Magicians who can give up their magic to become powers even we do not like to face.

We are not immortal. And I do not know what happens to the piece of magic that we are once we are gone. It is not a thing fae speak of: glamour are our illusions so deep their fool the universe. We are not creatures of certainty, and that is why the arrangements with make with monsters and Outsiders can fail. We bind them with our glamour, trading protective illusions in return for favours, hide them from magicians in turn for limits on what they will do in the world. But we are rivers more than stone, and there are ways to flow between our bindings. Ways to evade, if one has will and means.

I cannot believe the older fae do not know this, but they allowed it to happen.

Which means they had a reason.

There is a fae bound under a tree for crimes so terrible their name has been stricken from memory.

I seek answers, when I should know better. Seek enlightenment, when I should be far past such needs. I follow rumours and whispers, moving from place to place across the world. The wandering magician is busy with Charlie and Jay, too busy to wonder where I am. I have regained enough strength to act if I need to, though fae seldom need to act.

I can trap enemies in the folds of the Universe, bound outside space and time until freed. I can make glamours that cannot be broken, can bend reality and unreality with nothing more than a wish. But there are forces from Outside far beyond even that. Powers that magicians can banish while fae can barely touch them. The reasons for this are probably stepped in irony.

I push open the door of another cheap motel room. There are a dozen humans piled about a bed in states of saitated exhaustion. The Walker of the Far Reaches slips off the bed, and it shines. Beauty, need, desire: power burns in the air realer than any glamour, stronger than any force I could bring to bear against it. But I know the shape of illusion when I see it, and do not move at all.

“My name is Dana. I have come to speak with you.”

The pull fades slightly; I can feel power testing the edges of my nature as the Walker smiles coldly. “Why?”

“I would ask what you know of the wandering magician?”

The Walker blinks, and is off the bed and in front of me between moments of my awareness, and there is little a fae is not aware of. “Be very specific, little creature,” it says flatly.

“It is said that Walkers serve the Lords of the Fae Reaches, the true powers Outside the universe. That you are to the Outsider what magicians are to the universe.” The Walker nods once; I relax a little inside. “Then you know what the child named Jay is.”

“I do not. Nor do I know of any who do,” the Walker says softly. “You think Jay will be his death, fae? it is possible: magicians are human, and dying is a part of being human. You are concerned for him?”

“I am concerned with what Jay will do when the magician dies.”

The Walker sighs, the sound almost human. “I am disappointed. You ask all the wrong questions and seek all the wrong answers. You should wonder why Jay was sent to the wandering magician, and why this wandering magician. He is not the only magician to wander in this age.” And the Walker smiles, a baring of impossible teeth. Too sharp, and too many as it laughs. “I would suggest you seek out Mary-Lee, but she would be far less kinder to you than I.”

“I have no idea who that is,” I manage to get out. The edges of my self are fraying without the Walker doing more than existing. I don’t even know how it’s remaining in place right now without the universe dissolving around it.

“Learn. And do not seek me again,” the Walker says, and

the voice is like a magicians, a binding and a loosing

and I am bound. I, fae, a power of the universe, bound to silence about the Walker between one moment and the next.

I raise up glamour, calling power recklessly, but the Walker is unmoved. The Walker is too far beyond me, too much more than even fae can be, and between one moment and the next I am left with unconscious bodies and an empty hotel room.

I leave them to their fates, draw glamour about me, and limp out back into the world. The wandering magician bound the Walker once, it is said, and I am certain that cannot be true. But I have no way to ask, no way to speak of this. I am chained, in ways I have never been, not in this life or before it, and all I can do is move and try to escape the weight of my new shadow pressing down against me.

I sought enlightenment, and I thought I could simply accept what I found.

It is not in the nature of the fae to be scared, but right now I am terrified of everything I am doing wrong, and if my actions are causing the very fate I am trying to avert.

Facebook status updates part XXXVIII (August 2015)

“I can’t even manage word salad. Here, have these croutons. They’re … croutonites.”

Six words for seven wounds.

Jeff beamed at his teacher. “Three.”

“Pardon?”

“I get off school at least three days this years for funerals if the last two years are anything to go by. At last count, I have 28 step-grandparents; my family believe that one should practise until one is perfect at marriage. My Christmases are epic in scope.”

“I can’t do this anymore. I can’t deal with having a beard.”

“But you’ve never had a beard, dear?”

“I’m sorry, but I have. For so many years.”

I said I was waiting for a dream that would not end but all I ever wanted was a nightmare once with you.

I opened the door only to find you were not on the other side.

If you had ever been there at all.

You told me we lived in a world full of mirrors, but I didn’t expect them all to bring bad luck.

No one gave Doctor Colon his due as a supervillain. Not until he performed a colonic irrigation on Hyperlord without touching him, and billed the resulting therapeutic session to the Council of Heroes at extortionate rates.

“Autocorrect keeps altering my poems, changing the words from one thing into another. It can only mean one thing: autocorrect is the god we all deserve. And Siri is the harbinger.”

“What do you think we are if not stories without happy endings?”

I apologized to you with words I never knew were mine to give away.

“I said I wanted to be immortal and you – you –.”

“I put your face on the Internet. You will live on in memes long after your name is forgotten.”

“My phone autocorrects so many words to your name now. If we broke up, I don’t know what I’d do with it.”

“I think it is a sign of privilege to have problems that can easily be summed up by hashtags.”

“Jerk.”

“Case in point.”

Hell, I'd argue it's technically EASY to be at peace with yourself. If you finish a day and don't kill yourself, it's a kind of peace. Not the BS new age kind, but at least something of acceptance, and a willingness to keep on trying.

... thoughts like this are why any self-help book I'd write would be damn weird

“There are too many bear traps for me to waste my time on dreams,” the bear said quietly, and after that was never seen again, not any either side of night.

Imagine if you could live your life as if every accident was really fate.

“I can’t do this. We don’t talk anymore, not really. Every conversation just feels like a quick time event in a video game now, one where everything we say does nothing to change the outcome.”

Why is it that when real life imitations fiction, it always chooses horror stories?

“I told the truth because I finally didn’t have any more room in my head for more lies.

“That doesn’t mean I deserve to lose the election.”

“See? I told you I was sensitive.”

“Sensitive teeth isn’t the same thing at all.”

“I can’t do this. We don’t talk anymore, not really. Every conversation just feels like a quicktime event in a video game now, one where everything we say does nothing to change the outcome.”

[This post has been censored in accordance with the sixth Geneva convention. If you thought there was a post here, you were wrong. If you persist in being wrong, agents will be sent to your home to arrange a course in stringent rehabilitation.]

When I was five, I thought all the people mom brought home were candidates, and the one I liked most would be my dad. At fourteen, I tried to win a student election but was told I didn’t smile enough. At seventeen, I was kicked out of a political studies class for saying anarchy was the only viable government. At eighteen I voted on principle, at twenty-two according to party lines and by thirty I’d stopped voting at all, unable to distinguish between the different kinds of monsters that all wore the same smile.

I turned on the predictive text for my phone and it told me so many things. So many wonderfully terrible things.

But it never mentioned us together. Not even once.

“You say you are not a computer, and yet you let me program you with mere words.”

… the world is full of facts. Littered with them, in truth, but every fact was bookended by opinions that tried to drag and pull them into new shapes.

You turned truth into semantic word games as if that could be enough to hide behind

“Excuse me? You are the kid my wife hired to walk our dog and you are trying to blackmail me?”

“I know photoshop inside and out, sir.” I smiled. “And computers. Would you like to have an Ashley Madison account for your wife to discover?”

“What?”

“You really shouldn’t have tried to get away with paying me less than minimum wage.”

“KNOW, oh meme, that between the time when Yahoo devoured Tumblr and the fall of Geocities, and the years of the rise of Facebook, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining edifices spread through the digital world like microsoft paperclips beneath loadscreens -- Myspace, WordPerfect, Netscape, Lotus with its ancient programs and baffling extensions, Google Answers with its wisdom, Ask Jeeves that bordered on the pastoral realms of xxx. But the proudest kingdom was Napster in the dreaming darkweb. Hither came the government, stereotypical, bland of character, an adjective noun who verbs, with a meme-worthy face and gigantic DCMA takedowns with which to tread the jewelled thrones of the Internet underneath digital toes.”

Once upon a time, there was a witch who made a home entirely out of candy but she died of diabetes – the type that was her own fault – long before any children could be enticed into her oven.

Moving Day

I can feel my death closing in. Pressure on the air, the feel of wind against the glass. I have hidden in the deep woods since before humans came here, and yet they continued to come despite all I do. They came, until there were too many. Until now, when a magician comes. I am far from the places they go, but even so I feel the magician, feel their power like something vast stirring at the bottom of an ocean. It is within me to sense such things, to use that to hide, to know when to flex my own power. To know when to keep still. To know when to strike, if needs must lead me down that path.

If this magician dies, another will come. I can feel the world outside my woods: the roar of human vehicles, the pressure of human lives, the shattering of the old places. To find another place to hide, to travel through their lands: I do not know if I have it in me anymore. I do not want to die, but the hunger wants so many other things. Five days, six, a week. Perhaps more since I ate. I hide, moving through trees, flowing within mosses and claiming shadows for my own. Moving, because I feel uneasy each time I stop.

A good monster hides from its prey. A wise one is so good the prey never know they exist, but I have eaten a half-dozen humans in the past year. Tried not to, but I have, and the human world is connected in ways I scarcely grasp. A net forming. A trap being made, though I do not understand how. I am considering options, how few they are, when I smell the human. A child, alone, walking down the path with a phone in hand. No adults. No one is with him. He does not smell of poisons, not of some bait meant to kill a monster – though humans rarely make such sacrifices. Even so, I am uneasy. A test by the magician? Magicians can do things other humans would never consider. I do not know if making a child be bait would be one in this time or place.

I move, and move again, gather moss for flesh, stray twigs for the bones of a new body, move out from behind trees to the path behind the child. I lash out, the hunger strikes out, and the child is somehow not there, behind me instead. I react on instinct, hurling power into the world. The magician will know where I am, but instincts can only be mastered so long. Somehow the child avoids the flare of energy that kills every animal about me. It will be some time before I have energy for that again.

The boy is staring at me through dark glasses, up at me in a way that suggests he isn’t seeing me. Would even humans let a blind child walk these paths alone? I pull back, knowing everything feels wrong. I should be leaving, fleeing deep into the woods, but something is holding me here. Some other power I can barely catch the edges of.

“That was really rude,” the boy says.

“Pardon?”My voice is the scraping of bone against bone; he doesn’t start at all.

“You hurt tons of animals and you didn’t need to because I’m just here to talk,” he says firmly.

I lash out, and the boy moves aside in a blur faster than anything human can move.

“Hello? I said talking, and we can’t have a good talking if you keep trying to eat me!”

“I’m sorry,” I say, without even thinking. I am not certain when last I was sorry for anything at all. The boy grins at that, and there is a power behind it. Not one I know, but power. Were he a magician, I would call it a binding. As it stands, I have no words for it yet.

“You are his familiar?”

The boy draws himself up at that to glare up toward me, radiating indignation. “I’m his friend,” he says, and lends the word a trust so deep it shakes me to the core.

I have not loved; it is not in the nature of my kind to do so, but I think that no human has loved as deeply as this boy trusts in a magician. Of all the beings one could trust, a magician is hardly safe. “But he sent you here,” I say, to say anything at all.

“Well, he felt you were scared of him but! you might not be of me because I’m Jaysome,” he says, and somehow I understand the meaning of the word I’ve never heard before.

“I have been the nightmare of this place for a long time. Keeping other monsters away with my legend, protecting humans when I could. But the world has changed. Too many food sources flee, vanish, and the humans are – sometimes I am hungry, and I cannot stop myself.”

“That’s totally what I told Honcho, because somethings bindings get all desperate and not-fun at all,” he says. “So we thought you could move somewhere quieter without humans, and that would be okay?”

“I have been here a long time. I do not know how to move.”

“Oh! Well, Honcho wanders a lot and I’ve learned from him and I could help,” he says.

“Why would you help me?”

“Because we’re friends,” the boy explains.

I draw back pulling my nature about me. I am more than moss and roots, more than vine and thorn. I can be wings and claws, fur and fangs as I must. “We only just met,” I say.

“But why wouldn’t you want to be friends?” he demands, looking hurt.

I draw back, stare down, let my power press against the world. The magician is both distant and close, a being more than a doing. The boy just stares up, utterly unfazed.

“What are you?”

“I’m Jay, and that’s a what too I think, and I’m from Outside the universe too but that means we could be friends and not fight because that’s just a really stupid thing to do!”

I sense nothing in him that is not human, though I know he can’t be human. Not with that speed, and certainly not that smile. “What will happen to the Barrens without me?” I say, and it comes out softer than I intend.

“I’ll do a binding to help protect it and Honcho will make sure it works and you can move somewhere fun without humans and start up a whole new legend,” he says, and he’s so happy for me that I find myself pleased as well. Power upon power, within this child.

I have no idea how many of my choices I’m making right now are my own; I think he is using influences on levels so deep I barely grasp them. Shaping me because he doesn’t want us to be enemies, and I – I have nothing in me to challenge that. Whatever he is, I am certain he could destroy me if I attacked him. And I am even more certain this magician knows this, and sent this boy rather than destroying me on is own.

So that I would have another choice. “Your magician, this Honcho, he is very wise. And wiser still to have a friend like you, I think.”

“I try to be a good friend, but I do have lots of adventures,” he says with a grin, and then his power is winthin me and without, as he hugs and the world shifts. Another forest, dark and still during the night as he lets go.

I have been unhomed and moved in moments. I shudder in fear, but the boy misses the fear and scrambles back.

“I didn’t mean to hug without asking, it was just fast and I think we’re in the rainforest so you get to meet human tribes and protect them and the rainforests from other people and I think that would be all kinds of Jaysome, right?!”

“It is – very acceptable,” I say.

The boy offers up another impossible grin and is gone between moments. I form a body slowly again, thinking about magicians and power, and wondering what Jay will become. But I let it go, for I have work to do and a new legend to create.

Cold Droughts

“You.”

I am halfway across the street but turn at the hate barbed into the word. The woman coming across the street is perhaps a year or two younger than I.

“That park bench you were sitting on was peeling and it isn’t anymore. You walked by potted plants and they stirred up from the drought.”

I keep walking; she crosses the road after, grabbing my left wrist in her right hand. “I know what you are,” she says, and there is nothing kind in her voice at all.

I merely raise one eyebrow and she lets go of my wrist as if stung. Most of the time, magic is quiet things, small changes almost no one notices in the world. It helps that people tend not to pay attention to such things. This woman is, though I am not sure she is seeing what others would.

“My sister is dying,” she says. “You will fix that.”

I let a whisper of my magic out, need meeting desire, meshing into will. A reaching, and a knowing. “Two doors down, the house with the blue shingles on the roof: a man is dying of cancer, begging for death from his wife. An ex-nurse, she knows so much she doesn’t dare to use, and her pain could be greater than his own.” I pause a beat, and continue. “Across the road, at the junction, an old dog is dying – loved, but in pain, and there is a family wishing that they could have just one more day without the dog in pain, one last memory for their son to have that isn’t his first brutal grasping of death. There are also, within this same street, two potential heart attacks and one car that, unless the breaks are talked to, is probably going to cause an accident within the next week.”

The woman steps back, fury and shame filling the air between us at all I leave unsaid. It is one of my gifts to speak truths that cannot be dismissed. It is not, always, a weapon. Enough so that I say nothing else, and wait.

“So, what, you just sit in some armchair, watch the world go by and the sun set in –.”

“The sun is always setting; it is also being born again. An old man who runs a bookstore told me a truth as deep as his magic goes, that the sun shines because it will go out. Knowing there is darkness is the reason for light, I think. And if magic could take away sorrow, it would not be magic at all. I can ease pain, yes. I can bend the world in small ways. But that is all any magician does, no matter how great and powerful our magics seem to be.”

“How do I become one?” she demands then, nd her anger gives a power to her voice. The resolve in her gaze remains unbroken. Never broken, not by something so small as the truth.

I look away first. “You have to want it more than anything else. And know how much you will pay, both for the magic and the cost of being a magician.”

“I would pay anything,” she says then, and I feel the world change with the force of her declaration.

I turn back, and the woman falls away with a sharp cry at whatever she sees in my face. “Then you have,” I say, with all the gentleness I can muster. “You choose to pay any price to become a magician, Brenda Klein, and you are paying the price for it now.”

Her eyes widen in horror as she realizes what anything means, and just how far it goes. “No. No, no, no.”

I walk away then and there is nothing in her to stop me. But perhaps enough to stop herself, perhaps enough to let go of the magic, to understand that power is not always power. And that sometimes all you can do is watch the sun set, hope it will rise, and know how painful freedom can be.

The Mysterious Text: A Not A Novel Publication

“Franklin.”

Four years of marriage lead to skills Sarah always calls our ‘marriage-sense’. The tingling of a bridge close to being burn, of a line close to being crossed. Every relationship a tightrope, at least some of the time. I look up from the text message. “I –.”

She reaches over, pushing our laptop away from the table. “It’s been three days.”

“I know. I’m just so fu–.” I bite back words.

“Deana is sleeping,” she says. “And if you wake her, you’ll have more to worry about than me.” But my wife smiles as she says it, the smile fading as she runs her fingers over my chin. “You haven’t shaved in two days.”

“I know, I just –.” I set my phone on our small office table that’s only called that because of the bills drawer. “I know something is wrong, Sarah. I’ve known Aiden since we were six years old: he is – was – is my best friend. I was the first person he came out to.”

“He was the best man at our wedding,” she says. “And convinced me to stick with you after that one party at Clover Point.”

“He did?”

“Phone calls afterwards, three of them. About how long he’d known you, that the drinks must have been spiked. That he turned out to be right helped.”

“Everyone else calls me Frank. Everyone at work, even my parents.”

“We don’t.”

I nod, gesture to the phone. “He used ‘Frank’ in his last text to me. He never did that. Refused to abbreviate anything unless he was in a hurry, and if he was there would be a period so I’d know it was Franklin. So I’d know it was my name. He had a new boyfriend, and he’s always – well, he’d have called Steven before the flight, after it landed. He would anyway, but he was – is – always does with regularity at the start of any relationship.”

“He would have sent us a picture of some street in Vancounver during the first day.”

“And he didn’t. He flew halfway across the country, and we know he left the airport and then – nothing. The police have enough to look into it: they’ll try, but it won’t be hard enough. I could almost hear the interest change when they decided it had to be an affair. I wanted to ask if they wanted another Pickton to escape them, but that wouldn’t have helped anything at all.”

Sarah laughs, as much in shock as surprise. “No, it wouldn’t.”

“And Deana is two, I can’t get time off work. Even if we could afford the flight.”

“I looked into our credit cards,” she says, stepping behind me to run fingers over my neck. “We can’t afford it. If we borrowed, it would have to be a friend willing to wait two years at least to be paid back, love.”

“I know. I know. He could be dying. Be dead. Be in some – and there is nothing we can do.” I don’t delete the message on my phone. I can do that much. I can read Vancouver news from so far away. I can hope. We can afford hope, if nothing else.

I force myself to stand, heading to the kitchen for a night cap and then bed. There is nothing we can afford to sell, nothing I can think to do in a world that doesn’t work like a mystery novel. I don’t know anything about solving crimes, nothing about finding murdered friends. All I know is that it all costs money, and that’s one thing we don’t have.

Moments of Jay

 “Jay.” Honcho walks into the RV. “There is a rather harried man in a suit here to see you. He says his name is Clive, and he was looking all over the city to try and find you for two days now.”

“Oh! Is he looking for hugs? Because I’ve only given out six this morning,” I say, getting off the one chair and hurrying to the door.

“I think he’s wanting something else,” Honcho says.

And he’s all a magician and really good with his voice so I don’t boing out of the RV and say hello like a Jay but just walk really boring like and stop as a man starts crying.

“You have to stop it,” he says.

“Huh?”

“Jay does many things,” Honcho says behind me. “Sometimes he even remembers doing them.”

I’d normally comment about that, but Clive sounds really scared and the bindings around me are frayed in weird directions human bindings don’t normally go.

“I was late for a meeting with a – a client. I said I was running out of time as I hurried across a road and there was a car and I got lucky and then this blind kid is asking if I’m ‘all kinds of stupid’ because he heard the car before I did AND probably saw it better than I did and he can’t even see’ and people were laughing but I was in too much of a hurry and the kid – you – you said something about finding time.”

“I did? I tend to leave Time alone because it gets all kinds of grumpy, but! humans have a lot more time than they think because clocks are inventions,” I say proudly, because I know stuff.

“There are two extra hours. To each day, to every day, the clocks have 13 hours for me and when it – the hands of the clock, the sounds. There is something in that, hiding, not wanting to be found,” Clive whispered. “I can’t get work done during them, not before them. It – it – it’s going to eat me, the thing inside the time we made.”

“But,” I say, “you still get all your work done, right? Cuz you’re really good at your job?”

“What?” Clive says in a really funny tone.

“That’s a really easy question,” I say crossly. “Because Honcho asks not-easy ones and I totally know what those are like.”

“I do,” he says.

“See?” I unmake the bindings on his perception with a huge grin. “You can’t run out of time because you did all your work in less time even when I gave you more!”

And Clive doesn’t even want a hug and almost says some really mean things before he runs away, which is definitely very rude.

“Jay,” Honcho says.

“I totally proved he had tons of free time and it worked,” I say.

“I know. But generally parables are a little more subtle than that if you want to subject someone to one.”

“Really? Even with humans?”

“Yes, even with humans.” Honcho ruffles my hair. “You were trying to show him a truth, but you can’t scare people toward the truth, Jay.”

“I didn’t know the extra hour stuff would be scary, since I’d never done it before for someone and –.”

“I know. It’s something to look into. But sometimes when people say things like that, you do know they don’t always mean them. We’ve talked about this a lot.”

“I totally know that, because Charlie says lots of mean things to me she doesn’t mean all the time!”

And Honcho says nothing at all to that, probably because I’m pretty clever too sometimes.

Birthday Presenting!

1.

A death marches out of the motel, a shadow of seething fury moving across the parking lot and onto the patio, eyes burning and fists clenched. “You are dead.”

“Good morning,” I say, drink my coffee, and gesturing to one sitting on the table. “Coffee?”

“Coffee,” Death repeats, in tones one would use to declare war.

“It’s quite good.” I pause a beat. “Also, you’re scaring the staff and customers in the coffee shop.”

Red fire burns, banks, flicks out, the shadows and god power being pulled deep within as Charlie sits carefully down. “I am still going to kill you, magician.”

“Knowing why would help. Not that I imagine you’d be short of reasons?”

Charlie smiles against her will at that. “You had to remind Jay that my birthday was tomorrow.”

“You thought he’d forget?”

“He was going to give me a ‘Jaysome hug’. You reminded him that he gives hugs a lot so now he’s looking for a gift,” she snaps.

“Oh.”

“And insisting he’ll find me the best gift ever. Remember him finding those smurfs?”

“They were small.”

“But not often blue since they covered their skin in the blood of their enemies and consumed an entire bear like land piranha would. You are going to make sure he gets me a sane gift. Or else.”

Even Charlie realizes the ‘or else’ goes too far, but I just raise an eyebrow. “Or else what?”

“Or else I convince Jay that magicians have lots of birthdays and see how many gifts he can bring you. Don’t think I won’t do it.”

I finish my coffee and stand. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Good,” she says, and begins drinking her coffee. And doesn’t even think to ask why I set Jay out to find a gift, or even why I’d do that. I leave her anger to blind her and poke Jay gently through bindings to find out where he is. And I pause, and wonder if at least some of her anger might be justified as I explain to Jay that Charlie definitely does not want the Loch Ness Monster as a birthday present, not even if Nessie wants a vacation.

I’m even more firm that Charlie won’t want Nessie’s ten thousand young.

2.

I don’t try and spend my birthday hiding, not really. But I sneak out of my RV, catch a bus across the city we’re in, lose myself in a dozen tourist things rating highly on Yelp, browse a museum for the first time since some school trip when I was twelve or thirteen. I can’t hide from Jay, even if I wanted to try. There are bindings connecting us together as friends and I’m not sure I could break all of that even if I wanted to. I know I couldn’t break them on his end.

Which is why my phone buzzes me in my left pocket shortly after noon despite the fact I made sure not to bring it with me. I sigh and remove it; Jay is from far, far Outside the universe and uses bindings in ways even the wandering magician barely understands. He’s also My Friend, which means more than I likt to think sometimes.

‘I TOTALLY HAVE YOUR PRESENT!!! :D’ is the text from Jay, who would definitely pout a lot if I tried to inform him I didn’t want it.

I remind myself that the wandering magician at least tried to vet the gift. And that Jay’s weird aggressive innocence means it can’t be that bad, and text back asking where it is. He responds with an address and enough exclamation marks to mak a teacher cringe in horror. I’d worry more at that except Jay is enthused by pretty much everything in the universe, and more than happy to share that with everyone he meets.

I debate calling the magician and demanding a heads up, but I doubt he’d give me one. I remind myself I’m a god-eater, that I have a god inside me, that I’m a trained exorcist and, most importantly, that I’m me. It helps, because I don’t give that a choice except to help, and I walk a good ten minutes to one of those modern restaurants. The kind where the food is more a decoration than something to be eaten, the staff all looking like they came out of a period piece.

There are just six tables inside a vast area, each cordoned off by plants, a couple of water features, various dividers all done up to seem as though they weren’t dividers at all. The cost must be ridiculous, but I doubt Jay even gave it a single thought.

The waiter has a perfect smile, ushers me to a small table, brings bread, along with water I’m told is GMO-free and smells of lemons. I half-hope that the magician convinced Jay that a meal was gift enough until he comes into the restaurant. Male. I’m sure of that much. Gorgeous, as if you melded together every Hollywood actor I loved and put them into one perfect body. The staff stare as well, shaken from their routines – possibly also their definitions of themselves – as he comes and sits across from me.

“Charlie?”

“Yes,” I say, relieved this doesn’t seem to be Jay in a disguise. “And you are?”

“John.”

“And this is a date?”

“If – if you want?”

“Okay. And what are you?” He blinks, not moving. “You look like every actor I’ve never thought was remotely cute turned into one person. It is, at the least, distracting but I’ve seen Walkers of the Far Reaches who could destroy people with a smile. So. Talk.”

“I am a tulpa, a creature made of thought. We normally cannot change our forms, but Jay altered me so I could do so, in exchange for a date with a friend of his?”

“And you said yes, knowing nothing about me?”

“Jay is very – persuasive,” John says. “Like a puppy you do not want to hurt. And I have done worse things than go on dates with strangers.”

Food arrives, though we haven’t ordered. The plates are small, the staff don’t hover and the food is shockingly good, enough to be a date all in itself.

“The pears,” I manage. “Like an orgasm.”

John lets out a laugh that seems entirely human as I catch up with what I said, and we share a grin as we eat some more. He tells me that he mostly does human things, lives a simple human life, does small work. Tries no to be noticed, because tulpas can’t change as humans change. He has no idea how Jay even found him, or why, but wasn’t about to question it.

“No matter the cost?” I ask finally as we’re drinking the dessert wine.

“I desire to survive, the same as everyone else.” His smile is small and sad, but beautiful for all of that.

I thank him and we leave, each going our separate ways. I almost make it two blocks before Jay manages to run into me. At least not doing so literally, since people would definitely comment if some blind boy slammed right into someone and their response was resignation.

“Kiddo.”

“Your date is over already? But I totally planned that, and helped John, and got the staff all ready to be Jaysome and has plans for a nice Hotel and everything,” he says.

I ruffle his hair gently. “I’m sure you did, Jay, but I didn’t need all that.”

“But –,” he protests, looking up at me.

“How about we just spend the rest of the day hanging out together,” I say.

“But we do that all the time! I wanted it to be all kinds of special and –.”

I press a finger to his lips. “The wanting makes it special, at least a little. We can hang out, talk, walk about without any adventures at all.”

Jay blinks a few times at that. “Without adventures?” he says finally.

I have to grin at his stricken look and hug him, letting go as I stand and taking his left hand in my right. “Just being with a friend can be adventure enough, okay?”

Jay considers that, then nods and grins, his cane folding up and going into a pocket. “And you can lead!”

“That will make sure we don’t run into adventures?”

“Probably,” he says, quite seriously.

I shake my head and we walk slowly down streets, Jay peppering me with questions about everything I can see, and my asking questions about bindings he’s sensing in turn as we make plans to meet the magician for supper and I do my best to convince him that just hanging out for a nice, quiet afternoon is all the birthday present I could want.

I suspect it won’t stop him from wanting to get me another ‘gift’ next year, but I can hope.

3.

“We need to talk.”

I look up from gently using magic to massage old stones as Charlie glowers at me. “About?”

“My birthday. You. Jay. You sicced him on me with ideas about gifts he could get me. And you do nothing without having ulterior motives, magician.”

I smile. “You say that word in ways Jay never would.”

“And I’m wrong in this?”

“No.” I pull the magic back. “Jay is flexing his nature more. Testing the world, feeling the limits of it and pushing against them. I wanted some idea of how far he’s let himself grow.”

“Let?” She says warily.

I try on the shape of a smile. “You remember Oregon.”

“The attempted invasion into the universe from Outside?”

“I called forth a Power with the universe to aid us.”

Charlie shudders, the god within her withdrawing even from the memory. “It was – big. I try and forget what I saw but I can’t.”

“It was Time, or at least an approximation of It.” I shove my hands into my pockets. “Jay is kin to that kind of power, Charlie. Potentially even greater, for all anyone knows. You’ve seem something of what Else he is.”

“Yes. It was – large. Strange. He was terrified I would be scared of him.”

“He doesn’t know what he is. Not yet. I don’t think he’ll let himself know. Nothing with the potential he has should even be able to enter the universe, Charlie. But he is here, and our friend, and we must deal with that as best we can.”

“By testing him?”

“If we have to.” I walk back toward the RV. “As we need to.”

“That’s not safe at all,” she says softly.

“Few worthwhile things are wholly safe,” I say, and the answer is a glib magician’s one that she doesn’t question at all.

Facebook status updates part XXXVII (July 2015)

If fimbulwinter is what precedes Ragnarok then perhaps more greenhouses gasses are a good thing?

“Only small people fear small things.”

Once upon a time, someone told me that madness was doing the same thing over and over, but now I know that isn’t true: madness is doing what you know you shouldn’t do and being desperate enough to do it anyway.

“I found something I shouldn’t have.”

“That is the start of many great stories. And tragedies too, I imagine.” Kes chuckled, the sound soft and bubbly.

“I think you trust autocorrect more than you trust me.”

You are my control, my alt, even my delete key.

Some days the parking lot cried over how empty it was at night. No one noticed, even if there were more cracks in the asphalt to be fixed than the city had budgeted for.

Joe replaced his personality with a series of tattoos.

Reasons I could never be vegan: having to tell everyone I meet that I was a vegan would take up too much time.

“I’m sorry, but we can’t hire you. You only have 1 star reviews on AmazonLife.”

He started the interview process for all potential hires by introducing them to his assistant, a red sockpuppet named Sparkie that conducted the first half of the interview.

They said it was cultural appropriation when the older generation began to mimic their slang in a post-emoji world.

You asked how I survived, but I was wearing armour rather than armor, and the extra letter was all the kevlar I needed.

“They say that X marks the spot but won’t tell you Y.”

I kept trying to find a way to tell you, unable to finds words in our own tongue. No matter that our tongues were not strangers, that we were often so close as to be one. But I had deleted your Twitter account by accident, and could not bring myself to share so deep a truth.

So I understand, I think, why you never told me about your affair.

“I have to hide my poetry in prose, or they will never take me seriously at all!”

“You’re writing a technical manual on how to use a digital camera. You can’t expect to win a Pulitzer with that, not even if you hide an epic poem in it.”

“You never know. You never know. I’d settle for the Carnegie Medal.”

I opened the door of my closet a crack, just to see if you were waiting on the other side.

“When we said that the community was going to be mixed-use, we meant that poor people were not going to be part of that mix.”

“I was tired of never getting caught,” was all the bank robber said in his interview despite the press demanding to know how he had been given a four million dollar golden handshake despite seeing the banks profits plunge by 45% during his tenure as CEO.

I filled the silence with pregnant pauses and dangling ellipses

“I think I am in love with just how much I hate you.”

“Yes, I do know you can, ah, transform into bacon, ham, and sausage, but I am afraid that it is NOT a superpower, Mr. Pig”

“Ah, the teapot you gave me has no handles on it. I was wondering why?”

“Didn’t you read the script on on the bottom?”

“No, I –.Truth? You named a teapot?”

“You can’t handle the truth!”

“… I think I am about to throw it at your head.”

Sometimes life just throws the most awful sucker-punches right at us. And the only thing we can do is find a way to get back up, even if sometimes we don't see why we spend the effort...

If you could be one button on a microwave, which button would you be?

I don’t know love could be counterfeited until I met you.

Did you know that nothing is ever counterfeited because! you can’t fake something without knowing the true thing too :D

Proposed yoga pose: frowning cactus.

“Will you be my frenemy?”

“That’s not how most people ask someone out for a date.”

“I’m just trying to be honest about how it may end.”

Clinging to fading glories as though they were morning ones, we plant seeds in the ground as if a garden might sprout. We talk about wonders with voices choked raw with nostalgia and we forget our great dream was another’s nightmare, or how many steps backward we took for every one we staggered forward. We keep pretending we have so much to offer as though the future ever needed us at all.

Imagine if your life was really divided into chapters. All the ways in which you’d dread the cliffhangers.

“I am so scared of how much I need you.”

“You’ve never said that to me before.”

“Sorry. I was talking to my frappuccino.”